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New Scientist Live

Festivals 2017: Feel at one with the universe

The universe is the word at Europe’s festivals this year, with no shortage of ways to explore the night sky – and plenty of other science to pursue

Europe’s festival season offers plenty to enjoy for everyone

Bluedot Festival

By Mary Halton and extra reporting by Kat Austen

Bluedot leads the pack for science at festivals this summer. Following its debut at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire last year, this fusion of music, science and culture tackles the big themes, from the depths of the oceans to how to leave Earth. And you can hunt for new pulsars with the BBC’s Sky at Night team, get your hands on some graphene in the Star Field, and explore earthquakes in the Planet Field.

Up in the thrillingly beautiful Brecon Beacons in south Wales, Green Man is cranking out a wide-ranging space theme, as Explorer Dome turns the Omni Tent into a mobile planetarium. Or if you just want to dance or trance out, rock down to the algorave, where electronic music and visuals are generated live by algorithms.

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Tents, talks and tests

That daddy of all festivals, Glastonbury, has its Green Fields host a science tent that offers festivalgoers the chance to experience a supernova explosion, explore aeronautics and astronautics with real rocket parts, and test how reaction times and decision-making change under pressure – or just get blown away with the Lego Wind-Tunnel Simulator.

What makes us who we are is up for debate at Latitude. There’s Theatre Re’s The Nature of Forgetting, which looks at the neurobiological research into dementia and real-life experience of it. Or you can check out the festival’s ongoing collaboration with the Wellcome Trust, through a host of talks and experiments in the Faraway Forest. For sheer fun, catch Unlimited Theatre’s How I Hacked My Way into Space, the story of one man’s adventure told from where it happened – his garden shed.

Citadel Festival is still the newish kid on the block, but alongside music this year from Bonobo, Laura Marling and Michael Kiwanuka, it has old hand Guerilla Science bringing its unique sense of fun, with workshops on lucid dreaming and sensory speed dating.

Guerilla Science will also host a gig on attraction and identity at Secret Garden Party, featuring sensory speed dating and personality tests. And a special life drawing session will offer the chance to get a different perspective, with the audience trying to draw the world as perceived by people with perceptual disorders.

Wilderness Festival has some serious chemistry kit at The Apothecary, where you can make your own bath bomb, while the festival’s Sigma tent explores our obsession with bringing animals back from extinction and the experience of synaesthesia.

Smaller-scale highlights

Highlights among the smaller festivals include Ampthill sporting a science dome as part of its Out of this World theme, visitors to Just So snuggling up for a more traditional picnic-blanket approach to stargazing, and Also offering the relaxingly titled Tea and Theoretical Physics.

Makerspaces are on the rise, with SHMakerspace and its 3D printers at Always The Sun in Guildford. But if you’d rather break something than make it, Deer Shed’s Wrekshop might be just the thing – though you may accidentally learn some electrical engineering in the process.

In the wake of the world’s hottest year on record in 2016, festivals are taking a more focused approach to climate change, with low-carbon energy topping the bill in the science and tech pavilion at this year’s National Eisteddfod of Wales in Anglesey. You can try creating kinetic energy on pushbikes, explore how water turbines work, and create and race F1 cars. Or if you’re feeling more contemplative, you can listen in to the story of local mathematician William Jones, the man who proposed one of the most useful symbols of all time – π (pi).

The festival runs concurrently with the Sónar+D International Congress of Digital Culture and Creative Technologies (at which Bjork will also speak). The congress has an extensive programme of immersive AR and VR installations and the (you-have-to-be-there) “phosphere” installation by Daito Manabe and his Rhizomatiks studio, inspired by the process of mineral crystallisation.

Along with a line-up boasting the likes of The Weeknd and Lorde, Danish festival Roskilde has a dedicated makerspace, where you can draw with 3D pens, laser cut and – perhaps most important for the festivalgoer – make your own solar-powered cellphone charger so you can snap selfies powered by the sun.

The festival has also teamed up with Stop Spild af Mad (“Stop Waste of Food”) and Det Runde Bord (“The Round Table”) to stop food waste, using excess food to provide healthy and nutritious meals for asylum centres and shelters. And it’s hosting New Scientist favourites The Yes Men in its Art Zone.

In the picturesque Hungarian city of Sopron, VOLT boasts a spectacular line-up of international musicians and a host of cultural treats, from fire-juggling to the Always Drinking Marching Band. There is also a healthy dose of science, in the form of logic and action games, mini-lectures and spectacular experiments in the festival’s science centre – as well as programmes on innovation and natural sciences from the University of West Hungary.

Sziget on Óbuda Island in Budapest, Hungary, promises performances that explore what it means to be human. Perhaps the star of the show is Pixel, choreographer Mourad Merzouki’s mesmerising dance exploration of the boundary between virtual and real life.

Alongside some leading electronic artists such as Ben Frost and William Basinski, Bozar Electronic Arts Festival in Brussels, Belgium, is showcasing the best tech-art crossovers, displaying the work of this year’s STARTS prizewinners. These include I’m Humanity by Etsuko Yakushimaru, which explores the future of music by encoding it in DNA.